more on attaching audio/mpeg files

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Hi Janina -
I am using an AWE64 sound card with the ALSA drivers, the older version
4.1, which comes with the utilities "arecord" and "aplay" to create and
display a variety of sound file formats such as .wav, .au, and the like
(but not of course .mp3 or .mid). The key is to describe the standard
mime types in a .mime.types file or a mime.types file, then to specify in
.mailcap or mailcap what command to execute when such a file type is
encountered. My mailcap file specifies to use aplay for the .wav files,
mpg123  for .mp3 files, and trplayer for some others. 

If you had been using pine 4.10 you would have noticed that yhour audio
files would appear to be sent okay, but when they reached the recipient
the mime type would have been "application/octet-stream" instead of what
you  intended. The files would be intact, but the recipient's software
would not know how to handle them.

There is a cute little program called "talksender" which allows Windows
users to send and receive voice messages by email, which prepares a low
fidelity .mp3 file of the voice. It requires only 2kb per second of voice,
which is its advantage. It does not of course run in a Linux environment,
so I have been putting together equivalent capability here with the
available open source packages (for the most part). The best I have been
able to do is get an mp3 file down to 4kb per second, which is not bad,
and has distinctly better quality than talksender.

Chuck.


My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh 
You can bring any calculator you like to the midterm, as long as it
doesn't dim the lights when you turn it on.
		-- Hepler, Systems Design 182